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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28769025">Mac ‘n Cheese For Dieters</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/cowboylakay/pseuds/cowboylakay'>cowboylakay</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Community (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Eating Disorders, Gen, Jeff centric, M/M, Unhealthy Dieting, could be read as platonic or romantic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:35:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,741</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28769025</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/cowboylakay/pseuds/cowboylakay</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jeff struggles with his health and body image. An unexpected confrontation gives him the courage to talk about it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Abed Nadir &amp; Jeff Winger, Abed Nadir/Jeff Winger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>70</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Mac ‘n Cheese For Dieters</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>read at your own risk! this entire work is focused on the topic of eating disorders. it describes things taken from my own experiences with eating disorders. take care of yourselves!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He wishes it was a joke.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He doesn’t count calories or weigh food. He chooses certain carbs on certain days and allows himself a day of eating whatever he wants. He thinks it’s healthy because he can control himself, that it’s healthy because these meals are exactly what’s perfect for his body and what will help him look and feel good.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Instead, he cuts meals. He doesn’t do breakfast most days, because he has to do doorway pull-ups and sit-ups and weights. He eats lunch at the cafeteria, orders whatever looks appetising and is available, and eats half of it before throwing the rest away. He used to care about wastefulness once upon a time, but he thinks it’d be easier to explain why he couldn’t finish his food rather than explain why he wasn’t eating. It’s easier to say <em>I’m not that hungry,</em> rather than <em>I’m starving but I can’t eat too much or I’ll hate myself for it.</em></span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Dinner is an ordeal. When the sun starts to set, his daily anxieties return. He thinks, <em>I’ll eat a bit of dinner, then do some more exercises and go to bed.</em> Then he goes home and stares at his fridge and thinks <em>I can’t do this</em> and shuts the door. He goes to sleep on an empty stomach or with a few glasses of scotch in him, and defends it with <em>I ate lunch today. That was enough.</em></span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">One day, in the middle of lunch, Shirley confronted him. She’d deny that it was a confrontation, and maybe it wasn’t, but any time anyone asks him about food, all these walls come up and he finds himself unable to breathe. She’d asked him, <em>aren’t you going to finish that? I never see you finish all of your food, Jeffrey. Is everything alright?</em></span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He’d swallowed the rock that lodged itself in his throat, feeling everyone’s stares on him. In truth, no one that day paid attention to him outside of their study group, and even then, only Abed seemed to be looking their way, but it was always a guess whether or not he’s listening in on them or thinking about something else. Shirley had kept her voice fairly low, but to Jeff’s ears, she’d been screaming at him.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1"><em>I’m alright, Shirley. You don’t need to mother me,</em> he told her. She shrugged in the way that meant she didn’t entirely believe him, but knew better than to subject herself to his poor moods.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">That day had been a particularly bad day, because he woke up later than he intended and felt so weighed down by everything that he’d stayed in bed even after the clock ticked past the time he allotted for exercise. He’d looked at the pull-up bar on his doorframe with misery, knew he had to get on that thing to feel any semblance of humanity, but his body felt too heavy. When he finally dragged himself out of bed and into the shower, he’d cried. About what, exactly, he doesn’t remember anymore, but he knew it had something to do with the bar.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">The next day, he found himself unable to get out of bed, couldn’t look at himself in the mirror without wanting to vomit. He knew he liked what he saw, knew that his body as it was, with his firm muscles and concave stomach and his broad shoulders, was desirable to him. He knew that if he went out that day, hit on any girl, he could probably be in her pants before he could even say the word <em>carbohydrate.</em> But when he looked at the mirror, saw the way his body was shaped, the thickness in his sides that came with age and the lines in his cheeks that came with skipping meals, he wanted to throw his mirror out and never be seen by anyone ever again.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He stayed in bed after that. He had no idea how to defend it, how to say he couldn’t get out of bed without making up some sort of excuse. He didn’t know how to tell anyone that he’s actually not been doing okay. He didn’t know how to tell the truth to himself, let alone to others. He doesn’t know how to ask for help.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He cried again that day. He knows that tears come fairly easy to him, even if he’s more emotionally stunted than an inanimate object. Still, he couldn’t help but feel like he was pathetic, that his tears were for attention and vanity, just like every other aspect of himself, even if no one was looking. When he stopped crying, he felt empty, having let out everything he wants to let out, and then he was moving again.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He’d eaten two boiled eggs, skipped exercise, and left for Greendale. He’d arrived at noon, having missed his first two classes, but spent the whole ride concocting his excuse. He’s a lawyer, a professional liar, a liar who can put aside his humanity for his own goals. He has the perfect lie.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I felt sick this morning. I probably had food poisoning, most likely from the chicken I ate last night. I feel a lot better now though, but... chicken might still be a pretty raw topic for me,” He says, tacking a chuckle onto it.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Shirley and Annie wish him a better day, while Britta and Troy offer advice about how to pick chicken next time, with the former telling him to support local farmers and the latter telling him to make sure they’re actually cooked before he eats them. Pierce snorts and starts to tell a story about how someone poisoned him with rotten chicken in order to claim control over his company, only for him to survive. Everyone entertains him for a moment before they go back to studying.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Abed doesn’t, though. He watches Jeff the whole time he’d been speaking and even afterwards. He thinks it’s because Abed’s trying to figure out what he wants to actually say, because he knows Abed finds it hard to say well-wishes when he doesn’t know what it’s for. Abed looks away when they begin studying and doesn’t say anything until everyone gets ready to pack up and leave.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Jeff, can I talk to you?” Abed asks him, right as Jeff is about to pocket his phone and turn around and leave. When Jeff looks at him, Abed’s making direct eye contact, and somehow that’s more unnerving than what he said, so Jeff averts his eyes and waves the rest goodbye as they head out to the cafeteria.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah? What is it, Abed?” Jeff asks, trying to be casual about it. He’s gotten over his initial hold-ups about Abed, the uncomfortableness of his stares and actions having disappeared over the years he’s known him, and he thinks he actually likes Abed’s blunt honesty. He tells things as how they are, without beating around the bush.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Now, though, Jeff is worried. Abed looks at him again, then casts his gaze elsewhere. He hears the clicking of a mechanical pencil and realises Abed might be a little nervous too, which unnerves him to no end. Jeff is playing with the fabric of his sweater when Abed says, “Do you wanna go sit down on the couch?”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Jeff looks at him weirdly. It’s lunch time on a Wednesday, which is when most of the macaroni-vultures like Leonard and his old-folk-posse aren’t hogging all the mac-‘n-cheese on account of Intense Strip Poker. Abed never misses lunch on Wednesdays because he likes the cafeteria’s mac-‘n-cheese, because the texture is neither slimy nor dry. He remembers when Abed told him this, when he asked about why he was so excited for Wednesdays. He remembers asking the lunch lady what brand it was, and getting told it was just Kraft’s mac-‘n-cheese, and buying them later at the grocery to give to Abed. He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about that now.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Sure,” He replies, mouth dry with anxiety. Abed moves first, sits on the left side of the couch while Jeff takes the right. Immediately, Abed puts his feet up, tucking them under himself and pulling his hand holding the pencil out. Jeff sees his thumb rubbing the eraser bit and wonders what’s got him like this.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“So, what’s up?” He asks Abed after a short silence, looking at him. He looks away to the TV when Abed looks at him, feeling too exposed right now. He tries to regulate his breathing but that just makes him focus on his breathing, which is a lot harder to do when you’re aware of it.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Are you okay, Jeff?” Abed asks, and it takes Jeff by surprise. He’d been expecting— nothing, really. He doesn’t know what he’d been expecting specifically, but he knows it isn’t this. He expected to be asked to be in a movie he was making, or to do a homage with him (which he’d asked Abed to ask him directly about rather than keep him in the dark after their real-not-real dinner together, and Abed had agreed on the condition that Jeff stopped calling them <em>spoofs</em> and called them <em>homages</em>.) He was not expecting this question.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I—” He begins, but glances at Abed for a second through the TV, then his excuse melts away. Abed is also looking at him through the TV screen, which is as close to eye contact they can get without actually being direct. Jeff thinks he likes this more, rather than having to look at Abed’s too-honest eyes and see his true, repulsive self in their reflection. Something about the sincerity in Abed’s eyes, in how he sits attentive but also leans back slightly, almost mirroring Jeff’s posture but in the opposite direction, is what gets to him.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He breathes in, and decides he can trust Abed, because he isn’t Britta who tries to be the group’s therapist but is too biased and too caring to tell them hard truths. Because he isn’t Annie who looks at him with teary, doe-like eyes at the first sign of vulnerability. Because he isn’t Troy who thinks Jeff is just messing with him at first, and when he finds out it’s true, he tries to be supportive but the spark to share his feelings is already gone. Because he isn’t Shirley who will pity him and try to be motherly to him, even if they were less than five years apart in age and both in community college. Because he isn’t Pierce, who will laugh at his problems and call him gay, and when it actually matters, will tell him advice he isn’t willing to hear anymore from him.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He decides he can trust Abed, because... he’s Abed. So he tells him.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I’m... not okay. I’m trying to be okay because it’s easier to not deal with your problems, but I don’t know how to <em>be</em> okay. I’m trying to convince everyone, even myself, that I’m healthy, but I know I’m not. I... I treat my body like a temple, if the temple was a rundown, moss-covered building being repainted without actually fixing it. I’m not trying to be healthy. I’m just trying to stay thin and fit, trying to convince everyone that my muscles and slim waist are signs of healthiness. I don’t know how to be okay because I can’t remember the last time I actually <em>was</em> okay. I know I’m getting older, and there are more wrinkles on my face and more fat in my sides every day, and I’m trying not to care but I do. I don’t know how to stop caring so much. I don’t know how to stop cutting meals and skipping them when I feel like I’ve eaten too much. I don’t know how to stop fighting myself every night for whether or not I have dinner. I don’t know how to... how to stop. And I feel worthless for it. I want to be healthy, but I can’t even convince myself of what healthy looks like. I just... want to stop.” </span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He breathes in and out, and he doesn’t know when he put his head in his hands, but he wants to cry. He wants to cry again for the second time that day, because it’s too much and he bared his soul and he’s going to have to deal with the pity and the shame and the <em>fear—</em></span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">He feels a hand on his shoulder, all long fingers and firm touch. Abed pulls him closer and hugs him with one arm, using the other to gently pry Jeff’s hands from where he started tugging his hair and putting them down to Jeff’s lap, before that arm snakes around to his back. He manoeuvres Jeff’s head to his shoulder, and something in him breaks at that, and he returns the hug and buries his face into Abed’s shoulder. It’s an uncomfortable position, because they’re both still sort of facing the TV and they’re both on a couch, but Jeff feels... better.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Jeff is the one to break the hug a few minutes later, inwardly wincing when he realises he’d left a wet spot on Abed’s shoulder as he wipes his cheeks of tears, but Abed doesn’t seem bothered by it. Abed flashes a small smile at him, and Jeff finds himself able to look at Abed and not feel like he’s suffocating. He smiles back at Abed, a little wrung out, but grateful.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Thank you, Abed,” He says sincerely, throat a little scratchy and dry. He feels empty, but in a good way. He feels like, rather than smashing the bottle and letting the contents flow out, he’d opened the bottle and let the contents just pour out. He didn’t feel the sort of emptiness that usually came after crying, when his eyes hurt and his heart feels heavier yet more hollow, like it had grown in size only to make space for the pain in it. He actually felt good.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I didn’t do anything,” Abed replies, and he knows it isn’t a homage because Abed looks every bit just like himself. There’s no character he’s emulating or scene he’s reenacting. He’s just Abed, like how Jeff is just himself.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You were here for me,” Jeff says, as he leans back in his spot in the couch. He feels tired all of the sudden, and his eyes feel a little puffy. “That’s more than I could ever ask for.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“You can, you know,” Abed tells him, similarly leaning back and situating himself more comfortably in his spot. Jeff looks at him in question. “Ask for it. For help, or for a shoulder to cry on, or to just hang out with,” He elaborates, eyes flicking to his shoulder and his smile quirking up slightly when he mentions it. Jeff’s heart feels a little full when he does that. “I like hanging out with you.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I like hanging out with you too,” Jeff agrees instantly, feeling encouraged to be more honest now. “I like it a lot more when I’m not crying on you, though.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“That’s fine too,” Abed says, looking at his knee for a second before knocking his own against Jeff’s. “You’ll need to warn me first, though. The fabric of my hoodie isn’t really built for that stuff, so my shirt’s kind of wet now.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Jeff begins, only to cut himself off when he sees Abed looking at him with mirth in his eyes. That causes him to grin, and he laughs as he knocks his knee against Abed’s too. “Don’t tease me like that. I’m not gonna tell you if I’m about to cry.”</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Abed smiles fully this time, an expression that’s far too rare on his face. Jeff thinks he wishes Abed would smile like this more. Abed had gotten him to smile genuinely today, which was a bigger achievement than he thought it should be. He wants to do the same for him every day onwards.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“If we leave now, we might still make it for some leftover mac-‘n-cheese?” Abed asks him.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">Jeff thinks about it and is about to say no, because he’s not sure he can make the puffiness of his eyes go away, but he sees the look in Abed’s eyes, and fuck anyone who says that he’s a robot incapable of emotions. He’s more human than anyone Jeff’s ever met in his life. He wishes everyone else saw that.</span>
</p><p class="p1">
  <span class="s1">“Sure. Let’s go get some mac-‘n-cheese.”</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>because sometimes all you need is someone to listen</p><p>i’m <a href="https://cowboylakay.tumblr.com/">lakay</a> on tumblr</p></blockquote></div></div>
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